A Note from the Editor

Abstract

A Note from the Editor John Fletcher Every issue of Theatre Topics is a time capsule. We write today, guessing what tomorrow's readers might need. No author for this issue, however, could have predicted how abruptly and drastically our lives would change between February and November of 2020. Theatre Topics volume 30, number 3 is the last issue featuring work from The Time Before. The authors you read here wrote in blissful ignorance of the global pandemic. Submitting their work for the long process of review and revision in late 2019 or early 2020, they knew nothing of lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and the pervasive anxiety-boredom that defines COVID life. Although police violence against BIPOC individuals is a longstanding outrage, none of the writers for this volume could have foreseen how the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others would provoke a broad wave of protests hammering home the truth still not fully realized: Black Lives Matter. Finally, all the essays and notes contained here capture a view from a time when live theatre was possible, commonplace, and perhaps even taken for granted. We don't know, even as I write this, how the crises we are facing thus far will resolve—or if they will. The next issue (volume 31, number 1) will be the first one written from the middle of COVID. Following that, we have a Call for Papers for a special issue on "Essentials." In those issues, we will grapple together with this unprecedented moment in our field and in our world. What can we preserve? What new possibilities can we realize? What do we put away forever? These are questions for us all as teachers, artists, scholars, and people. For now, however, I invite you to read these offerings from 2020 BCE (Before the Covid Era). Conrad Alexandrowicz's provocation reminds us that, even as the acute catastrophe of the pandemic shakes us, our world's chronic climate crisis continues. I am caught by Alexandrowicz's desire to listen and respond to our students' "climate grief"—the stress and dismay they feel at adapting to the consequences of their predecessors' complacency and pride. He reaches out and reaches back, brainstorming ways to transform grief into action. Theatre, Alexandrowicz insists, can help students and us to join in the constant labor of resisting extinction. David Eshelman relates a production that resists historical erasure. The musical he and his collaborators create aligns with the present moment's call to reevaluate our local and national histories in light of larger struggles against white supremacy. Eshelman goes further, however, sharing the techniques he incorporated as playwright to ensure that the play does not simply re-inscribe white people as the central characters of American history. The complexity and ambiguity he introduces into the script interrupts white audiences' tendency to see themselves as the main heroes of antiracism. In "State of Play: Theatre Education at a Crossroads," Jodi Kanter reflects on the ambiguities and complexities that her students unearth in another's play. Excited at the chance to produce edgy work by an established playwright, Kanter is at first taken aback when her students call out numerous problems with the script's portrayal of race-based comedy. Kanter listens to her students. By approaching their concerns with curiosity and understanding, she models an admirably collaborative pedagogical and theatrical relationship. After hearing her students, Kanter decides to cancel the planned production. In a time when we ache to see live theatre, the notion of not producing a show might seem frustrating. But Kanter's careful analysis helps us to see how important it is not to place the opportunities we perceive higher than the values we hold. [End Page ix] If Eshelman and Kanter help us to see the virtue of restraint, Sissi Liu's essay gives us a lens for analyzing joyous, tactical excess. Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music represents one of the most daring and original theatrical offerings of the last ten years. Liu's theory of "designturgy" contributes to the ongoing critical conversation about Mac's work as well as to larger discussions about postdramatic theatre. Her analysis...